Anne
Eleven years and fourteen bodies later, I’d arrived at the pinnacle of my success. My first was a man who deserved it. My second was a man who didn't. After that, it stopped mattering.
My fingers trailed over the dried canvas, grazing the slight bumps beneath the paint.
No one knew what was sealed inside it—ground skin and hair from my last kill, pressed into the gesso before the first stroke.
A man from Essex. A man with a track record: smashed cheekbones on three different women, a stalking charge that never stuck, showing up drunk at his last girlfriend’s door with a baby on his hip and hate in his eyes.
I didn’t think about her. I didn’t think about the child.
I needed a warm body. A canvas needs its ground.
I’d left most of Luke scattered across the table in the back room—what remained after the scalpel had done its work.
It had taken years to perfect the technique.
Peeling skin cleanly from the fat beneath requires patience, a steady hand, and a particular relationship with disgust that most people never develop.
Sometimes I stretched the pieces over wooden frames first, moisturised them over days until they softened back toward something almost living.
Then the glue. Then the paint over the top, sealing everything in.
The lilies on the windowsill were almost overpowering now. Almost.
The smell beneath them was still there—that low, copper-sweet rot that no amount of white flowers ever fully buried. I’d stopped trying to kill it. It had become part of the atmosphere in here. Part of the work.
I chuckled softly to myself.
Another one finished for the exhibit.
I stepped back and let the painting have the room.
It was large—nearly two metres across—and it demanded that kind of space, that kind of distance before it gave itself up properly.
Foreboding buildings flanked a slick black road on either side, their facades consumed by degrees into the surrounding red.
Not fire-red. Not blood-red. Something older than both.
The colour bled inward from the edges, darkening at the corners like a bruise deepening, until it reached the centre of the canvas where everything narrowed to a horizon line—a single thread of rich amber holding the whole composition together.
The promise of a new dawn.
I tilted my head. Luke’s contribution was somewhere in that amber. The finest flakes of him, ground to almost nothing, dissolved into the medium before I’d laid the colour down.
Not many people could claim to truly love their work.
I pressed my fingertips to the canvas one last time, feeling the texture shift beneath my touch—the paint, the primer, the secret beneath both—and smiled.
?? ?? ??
The pub was quiet, but loud enough for me to focus on finding the next target for my canvas. I could use what was in my freezer, or the pieces in my airing closet.
I twisted the glass, watching the condensation drip beneath my thumb until it landed on the table. That desolate emptiness flared enough to take me back—back to a time when I thought being hurt by others was normal. Broken in all the right places.
After Owen, everything changed. Not because the people around me suddenly became model citizens.
I changed.
They thought I was broken because I stopped fighting and complied. Hell, I even began to enjoy some of the depravity that my father and Owen inflicted on me. I stopped prying my skin apart with the razor and began to plan the moment when it would be their skin that I sliced into.
The emptiness dialled down a notch.
My breath came ragged at the memory of their bodies. The moment I slid my fingers beneath the gash and felt the warmth of their insides. If I had a dick, I would have stuck it in there that night.
I closed my eyes. The murmurs of other patrons, laughter, glass against glass, a hint of music beneath it all—sounds layering over each other in varying degrees until they blurred into something almost meditative. But the sound I loved most was when they begged for their lives.
“Hello,” a deep voice said. “May I join you?”
I half-opened my eyes.
It never failed.
A young woman alone at a bar.
He was dressed in a tight t-shirt and loose-fitting jeans, aftershave overbearing, hair gelled into something approximating a quiff and scraped down at the sides. It was his hand on the pint glass that caught my attention—the faint pale line where a wedding ring had recently lived.
“Of course,” I smiled.
Even as the mundane conversation began, I catalogued him. Fat-to-muscle ratio. The way he held himself. I leaned in and rested my hand on his thigh, feeling the warmth of him through the thick denim. He paused and cleared his throat.
“Can I get you a drink?”
“A bramble, please.”
He frowned.
“Don’t worry—the barman knows how to make one.”
I watched him walk to the bar. They always felt entitled once they’d bought you a drink. More so if it stretched to a meal.
I slipped the pill into his pint glass.
They truly brought it on themselves.